- Who would have thought there were so many Australians with soul. It seems like every week there’s a new quartet, collaboration, ensemble or collective, crooning their way to success with brassy aplomb, most of them with more instruments than a hedgehog has quills. It’s almost enough to make you want to have a meltdown, until you actually have one. Which leads us here, either a humorous segue or grim portent depending on your narrative lens.

More than just an unfortunate spillage in the dairy isle and a six month ban, The Meltdown in question here are a seventeen piece funk, country, soul, guitar, synth, posi-goth, hyphen behemoth. Scratch that, they’re actually just a modest eight piece of Melbourne based Soul/Jazz/Blues. Brought to you buy the purveyors of the finest radioactive gospel.

They’re really good at what they do too, managing to make a forty minute record play on long past any real sense of time, and the tongue-in-cheek decision to put long winded country blues ballad Forever And Always before Don’t Hesitate’s alt-gospel proselytism of positivity is just one of many master strokes of ironic cohesion. Swaying between bouts of mild-tempo’d pain and moderately paced pleasure, big-brass spear and backup vocals at hand, un-derisively self-titled is an album poised to leap into the roiling fray of the fatted music industry midriff.

We live in tumultuous times, and having something familiar like this to fall back on can be a great relief. So, imagine the comfort of slipping in and out of genre tropes like trying on the guests’ coats at your parents’ key party, this one a little George Clinton and that a Little Marvin Gaye, all of them still super-cozy despite or because of being so big you’ll never touch the sides. In this way, The Meltdown are a misnomer made balm and prescribed against their moniker. Keep rubbing it on and surely you will find relief.

- Nic Addenbrooke.